Wenceslas Hollar and Christopher Beeston's Phoenix Theatre in Drury Lane

Abstract

In 1616 Christopher Beeston converted a cockpit in Drury Lane into a playhouse known as the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane. It was the second enclosed and private theatre in Jacobean London, Blackfriars being the first. With the exception of the Cockpit in Court, this theatre not only survived the vicissitudes of the Interregnum, continuing to operate covertly and sporadically, but also it emerged at the Restoration already adapted with some limited capacity for mounting productions decorated with changeable scenery. Yet in spite of their historical importance what is known about the architecture of this and the other private theatres, the Blackfriars and the Salisbury Court, remains essentially speculative. Because of the lack of specific internal and external graphic evidence, reconstructions of these theatres have been made from deductions drawn from close readings of play texts. With regard to the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane, Leslie Hotson laid the foundations for basic research into its reconstruction when, in The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, he wrote up his discovery of documents in the Public Record Office that dealt obliquely with the site on which the theatre was built. However, he was reluctant to accept the contemporary evidence afforded him by Hollar in his View of West London, 1657, [Fig. 26],Unfortunately we have no graphic information as to the shape and appearance of the Cockpit Theatre, I fully expected to find a clear representation of it in Hollar's Bird's-eye View of West Central London, drawn in 1657, but I was disappointed; unless indeed we are to take a three-gabled structure, which stands where the Cockpit should be, for the theatre.